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Google’s Chrome Developer Tool Updated

In response to user feedback, Google Chrome Developer Tools has seen some recent improvements in terms of some of its existing features, and some new ones as well. Chrome Developer Tools is partly developed via the WebKit open source project. It offers users a stable environment for optimizing and debugging web applications or websites that run in Google Chrome.

The improvements within the Chrome Developer Tools feature set were recently posted on the Chromium Blog. Network instrumentation is one of the areas of priority that received extra attention from the tools’ developers. Users can now see more vital web page information at a single time, as network aspects are now viewable in the Network Panel, which shows the resources that are downloaded over the network. Network aspects data can be sorted and cleared, as well as exported into HAR format.

Timing information has also been improved. Instead of coming from WebKit, timing information is now supplied by the network stack. This offers a higher degree of accuracy when it comes to raw network timing.

Timing information is presented in a user-friendly format that can be accessed by simply hovering over any of the log entries. Timing in terms of proxy, DNS lookup, connecting, sending, waiting, and receiving are all available.

Another upgrade in Chrome Developer Tools is the integration of status messages and raw HTTP headers that offer detailed information on what the browser received from the server. The integration improves on the older format, where users were only shown how the information was interpreted by the rendering engine. Users can now view syntax-highlighted resource contents as well.

{mospagebreak title=CSS Editing Improved}

Besides the improvements in the area of network instrumentation, CSS editing has also been revamped to become more user-friendly. Property names and values now have their own separate fields. They previously shared a single field. To save time when typing property values, keyword suggestions will appear.

The problem of disappearing invalid properties has also been addressed. Chrome Developer Tools was fixed to give users the ability to view CSS properties not recognized by WebKit.

The improvement comes from a change with the CSS sidebar that will now show the actual raw information that the browser receives from the server, instead of just showing the interpretation from the rendering engine. This improvement with the CSS sidebar is similar to the one implemented with the aforementioned network panel.

All of the new improvements in Chrome Developer Tools add to its existing feature set. The application is written in JavaScript and CSS, and gives users the ability to debug JavaScript, improve app speeds, improve web page appearance, and more.